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The Khashoggi Gambit

by Paul Fitzgerald – Elizabeth Gould

Now that we know Washington Post “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi has indeed been assassinated, and may now sleep with the fishes alongside his old family friend and confident Osama bin Laden,what are the odds that his gruesome death at the hands of a 15 man Saudi “hit-team” at approximately 1:17 P.M. on October 2, not only provides the pivot away from the post-World War II American world order – but advances the transition to a multipolar world? Khashoggi’s assassination puts Saudi Arabia’s “de facto ruler” and “reformer” Prince Mohammed bin Salmon (MbS) in the glare of a harsh spotlight when he can least afford it. MbS’s war in Yemen is a source of growing world outrage. His leadership is viewed as “toxic” by senior members of the royal family and his loyalties have been under suspicion by Western intelligence elites since his rise to deputy crown prince in 2015. His abrupt arrest and imprisonment of eleven billionaire princes and dozens of officials connected to the Saudi ruling elite last year went down badly with the Western chattering class who’d been well served over the years by Saudi largesse. Enslaving females, chopping heads or bombing school busses filled with children could be overlooked or even forgiven but cutting off those expensive nights at the London Ritz was another order of magnitude and they’ve been lying in wait for him ever since. What are the chances he’ll survive? Call it the Khashoggi Gambit. Odds are the CIA/MI6 will either organize a coup or push him into a deal with long-time Eurasian sleeping giants China and Russia. After all, a similar unresolved assassination in nearby Afghanistan nearly forty years ago in room 117 of the Kabul Hotel put U.S. forces directly into the Middle East, cemented an anti-Soviet U.S. – China military alliance ushered in the neoliberal world order and eventually the end of the first Cold War. How coincidental could it be that another political sacrifice – with many of the same characteristics and much the same balance of power at stake – would parallel events of 40 years ago and set the stage for an era that now sees a new cold war and the roles of East and West permanently reversed?

The myth of the “moderate jihadist” that Khashoggi embodied as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, brought the United States into Afghanistan in the 1970s and keeps American troops there today fulfilling America’s longest war. That mythology rests on the still cherished assumption that Western-hating radical Islamists will eventually evolve into “freedom loving” democratic/neoliberal free market capitalists if given the time, money and military muscle. That self-serving mythology plays into the very heart of the neoliberal agenda that at once keeps the U.S. fighting a vague, endless war on multiple terrorist organizations like the Taliban or barely disguised al Qaeda-surrogates while simultaneously supporting them. That this idiocy has already destroyed numerous secular Middle East states that were well on their way to modernity, and has since failed miserably in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria should by now be self-evident, yet the empire’s need to rule everywhere at any cost rolls on. Don’t be fooled by the gushing “free world” democracy PR campaign. Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of billionaire arms-dealer Adnan Khashoggi Khashoggi was not evolving toward liberal democracy, conservative democracy or anything remotely having to do with a “free world”. In the words of Alastair Crooke, “Khashoggi symbolized too, in a personal way, that ambiguous tentacle stretching between [Osama] bin Laden’s Al-Qaed’da and the Muslim Brotherhood”.  Despite his friendly, smiling face wearing an – oh so American – baseball cap on the opinion pages of the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi was a loyal propagandist for a brutal Saudi regime and an unreformed jihadist. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington even broke off a close relationship with Khashoggi, admonishing him for his blind adherence to the Brotherhood and its “cult” status “that has used terrorist actions to promote its views”. That he found a home at the Washington Post speaks to his pedigree as a dedicated neoconservative. As Alastair Crooke points out, “Khashoggi is hailed in the West as a liberal, favoring democratic reform, but in fact he was a staunch supporter of the monarchical system (of which MbS is the effective head). He contended however, that all these monarchies were ‘reformable’. Only the secular republics, he suggested (such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya) were unreformable, and required to be overthrown.”

Overthrowing secular regimes and replacing them with Muslim fanatics put Khashoggi squarely in the vanguard of Neoconservative foreign policy and his death at the hands of a Saudi death squad is a blow to their entire agenda. But it should be remembered that their agenda gained prominence in the first place as a result of a not so dissimilar atrocity leveled against an American Ambassador in 1979. As the cracks in the foundation of that agenda rapidly spread and power shifts from West to East, the similarities between the Khashoggi killing and the run up to the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1970s may make the current fiasco seem more than just coincidence, but a roadmap to something much bigger.

Lots of parallels can be drawn between the Middle East crisis of late 1970s Washington and today’s crisis over Saudi Arabia. The Boston Globe’s Stephen Kinzer believes the U.S. is acting out the same mistakes today vis a vis MbS as the Carter administration did with the Shah during the Iran crisis: “It’s always dangerous just to believe what the leader of a country tells you…We’re doing the same thing in Saudi Arabia now that we did in Iran during the Shah period, which is just to ask the leader of the country to tell us what’s going on and then believe it. So I think we’re more out of touch now with what’s going on inside Saudi Arabia than we’ve ever been in modern history.”

But the circumstances surrounding what the Financial Times (FT) referred to as the “reckless” Mohammed bin Salman may even more closely resemble the role played in Afghanistan by the equally reckless Afghan reformer, Hafizullah Amin at the kickoff to neoliberal rule back in 1979. Thanks largely to the machinations of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski; Amin’s Marxist government had come under attack from the U.S., China and Saudi Arabia almost immediately after assuming power in a bloody coup in 1978. Brzezinski’s plan to infiltrate and undermine Soviet control of its southern Muslim provinces dovetailed with the Saudi Kingdom’s ongoing operations to spread its version of radical Wahhabist Islam into Central Asia. Brzezinski and the Saudis shared a special off the books intelligence operation known as the Safari Club to spread disruption, subterfuge and assassinations in Afghanistan. The Safari club represented the true essence of the CIA ethos; an autonomous covert action organization with global reach, beyond the jurisdiction of American oversight.  But Amin was also a thorn in Moscow’s side and murderous opportunist in his own right. Moscow considered Amin to be a petite bourgeois and not a Marxist, not to mention a CIA asset. Much to Moscow’s displeasure, his radical social reforms antagonized the rural population and played directly into the hands of the Saudi-backed Jihadists. The Soviets wanted him to go slow, but Brzezinski and the Saudis didn’t want him at all. As he struggled to establish control a new U.S. Ambassador – Adolph “Spike” Dubs – was sent to neutralize Soviet anxiety and establish a rapport. Seven months later Dubs was kidnapped and killed in what has been described as a “botched rescue attempt” but was in fact an assassination. Amin accepted responsibility for the death but made secret overtures to Washington which went unanswered. Nine months later the Soviet Union invaded, executed Amin and “Russia’s Vietnam” was off and running. The kidnapping and assassination of Ambassador Adolph Dubs ended any meaningful diplomatic effort by the U.S. to prevent a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The death was employed however from that day forward by President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as the opportunity to increase the level of provocation for luring the Soviets into their own “Vietnam quagmire”. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Will the Khashoggi death prove to be the inevitable turning point for a final U.S. mistake in the Middle East, the way the Dubs death made inevitable the Soviet blunder in Afghanistan? Will the United States repeat the Soviets’ history and fall into the trap? The Khashoggi Gambit is rapidly playing out and heads have already rolled. The world won’t have long to wait, but will suffer the consequences of America’s lack of leadership no matter what the outcome.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved. More articles by:Paul Fitzgerald – Elizabeth Gould

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After recently finishing a multi-part series on the long history of “fake” news propaganda behind America’s current anti-Russia hysteria, a friend sent an email she’d received from “Bestselling Author & Dream Shaman Robert Moss.” Robert Moss currently leads seminars and workshops at some of the best known New Age institutions such as Omega and Esalen. He had played an important part in our just completed series, but not as a dream coach offeringworkshops in “advanced shamanic dreaming practices to journey into other realms and receive wisdom and gifts for your life.” The Robert Moss we knew once played a vital role in delivering tailored propaganda, exaggerated threats and outright fabrications to intentionally heighten Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. The Robert Moss we knew had been a key agent in steering Western Democracies toward extreme rightwing political candidates and policies. The Robert Moss we knew helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the new right-wing neoliberalism, the trickledown economics of Milton Freidman and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Moss has been described as one of the CIA’s main disinformation assets; having contributed to the military overthrow of Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende in 1973 and the subsequent atomization of Chilean democracy. In his work for British intelligence it was Moss who wrote the famous speech that transformed Margaret Thatcher from a racist anti-immigrant campaigner into Britain’s “Iron Lady” in January 1976. It was Moss who tutored Iran’s top SAVAK agent in a last minute attempt to save the Shah and it was Moss who propagandized on behalf of South Africa’s Apartheid regime.

For reasons that are not explained, there is no mention on Moss’s website that before he turned to dream work he was a prote’ge’ of notorious CIA and MI6 operative Brian Crozier. Along with the CIA and MI6, Moss left a high level and successful career as a master propagandist (i.e. an expert in lying) working for the Institute for the Study of Conflict ( ISC) and Forum World Features, a London based CIA propaganda news service which operated from 1965 to 1974. Nor is there mention of his relationship to the Pinay Cercle, a secretive international policy group which continues to this day to bring together financiers, intelligence officers and politicians with links to fascist organizations and political factions from around the world. Apparently unknown to his New Age audience, Moss was once infamously well known to the intelligence world. His roman – clef novel The Spike with co-author Arnaud de Borchgrave aimed at undermining the credibility of Vietnam era war correspondents like Seymour Hirsch – by portraying them as agents of the KGB. And his work on an anti-Palestinian narrative with Crozier, helped to establish the blueprint for the endless war on (Islamic) terror kicked off with 9/11. This comment from Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan’s 1989 The “Terrorism” Industry , makes it clear, “Robert Moss has been a major figure in the organization of terrorism think tanks and in the dissemination of the right-wing version of the Western model of terrorism. In fact, as Fred Landis has pointed out, “For a price, Moss would go to Rhodesia, South Africa, Iran, and Nicaragua and tailor his standard KGB plot to local circumstances, thereby justifying repression of the political opposition and denial of human rights.”

Moss withdrew from the world of make-believe threat-conjuring in 1987 to write books and run workshops on the power of dreaming. But with his cutting edge expertise in seeding the collective unconscious with lies and fabrications for political and financial purposes, can it really be assumed that Robert Moss’s dream work is only about helping people to receive wisdom and gifts for your life.

Robert Moss’s Students should be asking these questions In the interest of what some might call, “full disclosure” one would think Robert Moss would want to come clean about his past, rather than cast doubt on his motives. Trust is a vital commodity for those engaged in the intimate work of dreaming but Moss’s lack of candor raises questions. Both the CIA and Britain’s MI6 were known for their research into the military uses of psychic phenomena. The techniques for joint dreaming (entering the dream of another person) that Moss offers in his workshops, were explored long ago by the CIA’s Project MKULTRA and Britain’s Tavistock Institute.

Far from being fictional, the theme of the 2010 Leonardo DiCaprio film Inception is the corporate expression of weaponized dream research done by the CIA and MI6. The film deals with the commercial uses of dreaming in order to plant ideas in others for profit. Many viewers may have assumed the film was just fantasy but if a man with Moss’s capabilities in the collective unconscious has moved with his talents into the dream world, one might ask whether weaponizing the dream world isn’t part of the plan.

MKUltra Anyone?

The objectives of Project MKULTRA“involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain function.” The project was kept secret from its unwitting victims for two decades before being exposed, but there is no reason to assume research into the methodologies to manipulate mental states, ended there. The purpose of propaganda is to seed the unconscious with misinformation and what better way to reach the unconscious than dreams. An even better vehicle would be to seed a willing dreamer and it’s here that Robert Moss’s nondisclosure begs the question. Is the New Age movement being secretly penetrated and are the willing victims aware that they may at some future date be used as weapons?

Even more troubling, it makes one wonder how much of the New Age movement itself may have been secretly weaponized without disclosure by other “retired” agents. Could Moss be the only highly trained agent offering spiritual workshops to New Agers without proper acknowledgement regarding their past affiliations? Did Moss get any training or support from the CIA for his dream research? Is Moss really helping New Agers achieve higher consciousness or is he engaging in mind control? These are critical questions that must be asked before attending a Moss workshop or even reading one of his books.

Here are quotes from an internet post from 2007 by a woman who attended a number of Moss’s workshops that raised concerns about his background, sincerity and the purpose of his techniques. Whatever authentic shamanic power Moss might bring to his dream workshops, his lack of transparency left her uneasy and suspicious that the real Robert Moss was someone other than a helpful dream coach.

“He made a point” that a symbol from my dream which held particular significance for me in fact meant nothing at all (how could it mean nothing at all? – it was everywhere in my dream!). This is in direct conflict with his repeated statements that the dreamer is the final authority on their own dream, and that nobody can tell the dreamer what their dream means. I also witnessed him imposing what struck me as an inordinate amount of will when another woman in the circle was”using one of her own experiences. This was a person who had already been doing her own dream work quite well for the last 20 years.

I was beginning to get the confirmation of what I had begun to suspect, that this guy is really just in it for the ego gratification, the illusion of power, and the money, and anyone who won’t allow them to be manipulated by him to meet those ends is undesirable.

At the break ” his new trainee” tell[s] me to leave. The excuse she gave was that I was “too advanced” for this workshop, that this was “for beginners” and that I was “scaring people”. One thing she didn’t understand is that “Robert’s “advanced” workshops are “by invitation only”, and that I had never been extended an invitation to any of these. ” It was clear they just wanted to be rid of me”

CONCLUSION:

When Moss left the field of intelligence in 1987 to begin writing his books and offering dream workshops, both American and British intelligence had already spent decades developing military uses for psychic phenomena. It is necessary to ask the question before attending one of his workshops; is it possible for Moss to put his previous experience at deceiving the public (through propaganda) behind him. The fact that Moss fails to put his very scary background as an intelligence operative upfront on his website cannot be ignored by anyone, especially his students.

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OpEdNews 6/29/18 Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

1892 Caricature of Cecil Rhodes, master British imperialist of the 19^th century, was the consummate empire builder with a philosophy of mystical imperialism. As intended, the Rhodes Scholarship continues its influence on American thinking from a British perspective.  [Public Domaine].

“Brzezinski however couldn’t do much until the death of Dubs. And the death of Dubs removed the last obstacle. Then came Herat… They killed a lot of Russians and the Russians were very upset. But it gave a shot in the arm to the resistance in this country [the U.S.]. That was March of ‘79. So the coincidence of Dubs’ death and the Herat uprising gave Brzezinski control of the policy from then on.”                                               Interview: Selig Harrison February 18, 1993

The kidnapping and assassination of Ambassador Adolph Dubs on February 14, 1979 at the Kabul Hotel ended any meaningful effort by the U.S. to prevent a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The death was employed however from that day forward by President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as the opportunity to increase the level of provocation for luring the Soviets into their own “Vietnam quagmire” and keeping them pinned down for as long as possible. Because of “Spike” Dubs’ death, Zbigniew Brzezinski finally got control of foreign policy; got his hard line neoconservative policy toward the Soviet Union pushed through, ended support for détente once and for all, and put Strategic Arms Limitation on hold. Hafizullah Amin continued to seize power for himself, sew discord throughout the countryside with his education and land reform programs, fracture his political party the PDPA and game the Soviet leadership by asking them to intervene militarily fourteen times, knowing full well they were dead set against a military intervention.

Selig Harrison writes in his 1995 book with Diego Cordovez, Out of Afghanistan, “On the one hand, he [Amin] continued to call upon massive Soviet help in financing his regime, equipping it militarily and providing technical personnel for military operations against rebels. On the other, he resisted Soviet control, brushing aside pressure for a slowdown in reforms and for greater Soviet involvement in running the secret police and the military.”

Continuing his coup d’état in Washington, Brzezinski and his military assistant General William Odom proceeded with plans for the radical transformation of America’s nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD (directed mainly at the Soviet Union) into one of  nuclear “war-fighting” through a series of Presidential Directives. Most of these directives excluded the State Department in the decision-making and remain in force to this day. Based entirely on the fallacious assumption that the Soviet Union believed they could fight and win a nuclear war, President Carter, Brzezinski and General William Odom set out to win one of their own and build the weapons with which to do it.

Contrary to Jimmy Carter’s glowing public image as a peace-president and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, behind the scenes the former Navy man would embrace Brzezinski’s vision of an inevitable conflict with the Soviet Empire and relish his role as the nuclear war-fighting Commander in Chief fighting it to his last breath.

Author Tim Weiner quotes General Odom in his 1990 exposé, Blank Check, “Carter became the first President to immerse himself in the details of nuclear war-fighting scenarios. The President ‘really got into the procedures, ran through numerous scenarios, and became very comfortable with it,’ Odom told a Harvard seminar in 1980.”  Knowledge of Carter’s dark side has gone unrecognized over the years but despite the end of the Cold War in 1991, the horrifying product of his decision-making has remained intact with each succeeding administration. Presidential Directives (PDs) 53, 58 and 59 didn’t just lower the threshold for nuclear weapons use, they encouraged it; making it appear probable that America’s elites could save themselves in a protracted nuclear war of up to six months, regardless of the consequences to the nation or its population. Based on an invented threat of nuclear annihilation carried into the Carter administration by Brzezinski, PD 59 would form the groundwork of the unnecessary Reagan buildup in the 1980s which would then form the groundwork of the post-Soviet Wolfowitz Doctrine of American imperial supremacy that followed. As Tim Weiner noted with irony in 1990, “The President who vowed to rid the world of warheads wound up signing the first truly significant war-fighting plan since the heyday of Curtis LeMay.”

But the real irony of the Carter presidency wasn’t in his reprise of the mad bomber role from Doctor Strangelove; the real irony was that the greatest success of his presidency – the U.S- Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 – was not arranged by his skill at diplomacy or his desire for a Middle East peace but by an off the books agency doing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s dirty work in Afghanistan known as the Safari Club. John K. Cooley writes in his 1999 exposé on U.S.-backed terrorism Unholy Wars, “Just before the Afghanistan war began, and because the Safari Club was keeping both Israeli and US intelligence informed of its actions, the Club was able to help bring about President Sadat’s historic peacemaking visit of November 1977 to Jerusalem, leading to the US-Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979… Morocco’s representative in the Safari Club hand-carried Rabin’s letter to Sadat. King Hassan then sponsored the first secret meeting in Morocco…”

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat would play an important role in the upcoming war in Afghanistan, supplying old Soviet weapons to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s so-called Freedom Fighters in an effort to fool the American public and Congress into thinking the weapons came from Soviet and Afghan defectors surrendering to CIA-backed rebels. Sadat would upset his handlers in Washington in September 1981when he spilled the beans on the secret operation and would die by assassination exactly two weeks later, but at that point his usefulness to the Safari Club had ended.

President Carter hadn’t been assassinated as “Spike” Dubs had been and Hafizullah Amin would soon be, but he was served up as an unwitting participant in his own coup d’état before he’d even entered the Oval office. In the wake of the Church Committee hearings and Watergate and with the President’s knowledge and assistance, Zbigniew Brzezinski had rewired authority for covert action from the State Department to the National Security Council in what has been described as “a bureaucratic first strike of the first order”. A Cercle of old European power had then detached the administration, sealed off the CIA in Washington from further damage and run its operations out of the Middle East. The head of French external intelligence, Pinay Cercle member and Safari Club coordinator Alexandre de Marenches had stepped in to fill the breach during the crisis, aided the operation through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International and set the stage for a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that would drag on for nearly 10 years. John K. Cooley writes, “The Safari Club player who probably helped most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure was Count Alexandre de Marenches… He had cooperated actively with the United States in warfare and covert operations since World War II. He believed it to be of advantage to France, as well as to his American friends and allies, to form a group like the Safari Club to protect and advance Western interests in the Third World.”

The death of Ambassador Dubs, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 doomed Carter’s reelection to failure. Afghanistan was soon to become the self-fulfilling prophecy of Soviet iniquity that the neoconservative, right-wing alliance had been trying to create for decades; a permanent, ongoing crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations which it had precipitated and then claimed to uncover and respond to. Alexandre De Marenches had done his part to put all the pieces in place. Brian Crozier and Robert Moss had written the script and Brzezinski had sold it to the highest levels of the American government. De Marenches had even knowingly tipped off his cousin, Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave to be in Kabul ahead of the invasion to catch the action; action that the President of the United States (Carter) would later claim he had no foreknowledge of. But without the constant propagandizing of Brian Crozier and his protégé Robert Moss working behind the scenes with their influential colleagues, the sale of a right-wing coup d’état of the U.S. might never have taken off.

1980: THE SPIKE

If anything represented the payoff to the decade of neoconservative/right-wing subversion being worked on the American psyche by the Institute for the Study of Conflict, it was the 1980 publication of the fiction/fantasy/spy-novel The Spike. Whether or not the title was a perverse inside joke or a veiled reference to the death of American Ambassador “Spike” Dubs in Kabul the year before, The Spike would prove to be the Pinay Cercle’s final nail in the coffin of U.S./Soviet relations. Viewed in hindsight The Spike plays out as poorly written paranoid political propaganda masquerading as fact. But viewed from the fevered perspective of the American mass media of 1980 in the run up to the election of Ronald Reagan, the #1 bestselling novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss was nothing less than proof of the KGB’s evil “plot to destroy the U.S., exposed.”

“A humdinger by two of the savviest foreign correspondents in the business.” Wrote William Safire in the New York Times. “A thundering rebuttal to the architects of détente, critics of the CIA and editors of the opinion-forming, powerhouse newspapers from the East.” Wrote the Dallas Morning News.  “A thriller that is several steps ahead of the headlines.” Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle.

Praise from the mass media for The Spike and its two authors reads like an endorsement from Britain’s MI6 and the CIA. But to investigative journalist Fred Landis, who’d served as a consultant for the Subcommittee on CIA Covert Action in Chile of the Church Committee, Moss and de Borchgrave were anything but “two of the savviest foreign correspondents in the business”. To Landis they were coldblooded mercenaries, bought and paid to legitimize the right-wing’s agenda especially when the price was right. Landis writes in Inquiry Magazine that December, 1980 “Moss and de Borchgrave have built careers out of peddling gossip from right-wing French, Israeli, British and American intelligence agents that conforms to their one-dimensional ‘us versus them’ view of world affairs. The Spike is simply a logical, if paranoid extension of the propaganda they have hitherto seen fit to call fact. The book is thus an elaborate joke—the real disinformation lies between its two covers.”

But the elaborate joke of disinformation perpetrated by Moss and de Borchgrave was just what the neoconservative/right-wing had been using for decades to create their own reality. Thinly disguised fiction acting as fact would put the actor Ronald Reagan in the driver’s seat for eight years, keep the Soviets locked in a war to destabilize Central Asia for ten years and permanently destabilize the Middle East and South Asia with Islamic extremism.

As intended by the right-wing Pinay Cercle agenda, the coup of the century did turn the American government away from détente and peaceful coexistence. In befitting Brian Crozier’s “ultimate sophistication of subversion” it did get candidate Ronald Reagan elected who would complete the neoconservative/right-wing takeover of the American government while accelerating its privatization and politicization begun under Carter. And they would never give it back. The collapse of the Soviet Union did free Zbigniew Brzezinski’s treasured Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation and bring to an end the Soviet Empire. But as the intervening years have shown, ending Soviet Communism was not the end of history as claimed by the neoconservative pundit Francis Fukuyama. In fact, ending the Cold War only returned the world to an earlier and far more dangerous pre-World War I version of relations known as Great Power Competition and opened a Pandora’s box of old and new evils from which world stability is now reeling.

POSTSCRIPT: The lonely imperialist: Afghanistan, Brzezinski and the unintended consequences of Imperial Graveyards.

It’s 2018 and we’ve been here before. The pattern and the profile of events parading across our screens today mirrors the pattern and profile of events set out in the late 1970s by the Carter administration which paralleled the pattern and the profile of late 1940s and the genesis of the original Cold War. Following the death of Ambassador Adolph Dubs in February, 1979 we saw the outline of that pattern emerging in which a new reality centered on Afghanistan was beginning to form.

Our observation drew us personally into the debate over the arms race when we began production of a documentary on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) which we called Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. As production preceded numerous experts including Senator Ted Kennedy, SALT negotiator Paul Warnke and economist John Kenneth Galbraith clarified our understanding of the damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and capital investment into war spending would represent to the civilian economy, following Vietnam.

On the surface the mainstream media was selling a new arms race on the basis of a neoconservative-invented “Soviet threat” but the reality was very different. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already helped rigidify the capitalist system by bureaucratizing a large part of production for non-productive uses. He saw America becoming more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment immune from reality.

That fall, in Washington, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was one of the last holdouts in a sea of hysterical accusations about the Soviet Union.  At the time we didn’t realize that a slow motion coup d’état against détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had been going on since 1976 and was nearly complete. The bureaucracy was in thrall to the neoconservative’s Team B experiment which had discredited the CIA’s professional analysis of the Soviet “threat” and replaced it with an ideological one. Were the Soviets really planning a massive first-strike nuclear attack on the United States as the neoconservatives were predicting? Was SALT II really just a public relations scheme by Moscow to lock in American weakness while it prepared for war?

Looking back we know that these claims were based on the falsified intelligence, outright lies and fabrications of the neoconservatives. But when the Soviets crossed their southern border into Afghanistan it acted like a trance on the system, left and right. Afghanistan was of the lowest level of diplomatic interest to the United States. It was a far off South Asian country bordering the Soviet Union of absolutely no importance and had been relegated to the Soviet Sphere of influence during the Eisenhower administration. Numerous administrations had passed up Afghan requests for military assistance not wishing to disturb the balance of power in the region. Yet, when President Carter labeled the invasion, “the greatest threat to peace since the second World War” he gave the enemies of détente and SALT a new and reinvigorated Cold War and legitimized building the newest weapons with which to fight a nuclear war.

We now know that the decision to trap the Soviets in Afghanistan had already been decided long before their “surprise” invasion of December 27, 1979. The President’s reaction was political theatre. But at the time no one concerned about preserving SALT or détente inside the bureaucracy protested what they knew was really a politicized overreaction. Afghanistan had changed everything. By the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The U.S. had stepped through the mirror back to 1947 and the debate refocused not on whether, but on how much was to be spent to counter Soviet aggression.

As the first Americans to gain access to Kabul after the Soviet invasion for an American TV crew in 1981 we got a close-up look at the American narrative supporting President Carter’s new anti-Soviet agenda and it simply didn’t hold up. What had been presented within days of the December 1979 invasion as an open and shut case of Soviet expansion toward the Persian Gulf by Harvard Professor and Team B Project leader Richard Pipes on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour could just as easily have been defined as a defensive action well within the Soviets’ legitimate sphere of influence. Three years earlier, Pipes’ Team B Strategic Objectives Panel on the CIA’s estimate of the Soviet threat had been accused of subverting the very process of making national security estimates by inventing threats where they didn’t exist and intentionally skewing its findings along ideological lines. Now those invented threats were being presented as facts by America’s Public Broadcasting System.

In 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline. Our aim was to establish once and for all the credibility of the American claims. We discovered first hand from high level Soviet officials that they wanted desperately to abandon the war but the Reagan administration simply refused to take their requests seriously. From the moment they entered office, the Reagan administration had taken a conflicting position, demanding on the one hand that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action with the intention of holding them there. This hypocritical campaign, though lacking in a foundation of facts and dripping in right-wing ideology, was embraced by the entire Washington political spectrum and left willfully-unexamined by America’s mainstream media.

The final blow to Roger Fisher’s efforts came when he offered the New York Times a detailed article describing his belief that a negotiated settlement could be quickly achieved. The Times’ editor responded that Roger could write the article but it wouldn’t necessarily be published.

At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in Lysebu Norway in 1995, a high level group of former U.S., European and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the U.S. had resigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why had the U.S. chosen to overreact the way it did?

To Jimmy Carter’s veteran CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one very specific individual who ironically wasn’t present. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “This is an important part of the equation, it seems to me. None of us can escape our individual backgrounds; but in this case, the fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.”

What Turner meant was that Zbigniew Brzezinski had punched an ethical hole into U.S. policy by infusing his old world ethnic hatred of Russia, into U.S.-Soviet relations. U.S. officials were not supposed to bring racist beliefs into the public policy-making-process. But anybody who knew Brzezinski at the time knew full well that is exactly what he was doing.

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brzezinski ironically grew wary of America’s global overreach, much of which he had made possible with his actions as Carter’s National Security Advisor.

Although he had felt justified at using his imperial hubris to draw the Soviets into their own Vietnam and destroy Afghanistan in the process, he did not expect to see the same imperial process at work undoing the United States and in the same way he had undone the Soviet Union.

A year before he died in 2017, the architect of America’s use of Imperial power to attain global dominance made a startling about face in an article titled “Toward a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity, but given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.”

Brzezinski warned that the time for conflict among nations had come to an end because “During the rest of this century, humanity will also have to be increasingly preoccupied with survival,” a survival that could only be addressed “in a setting of increased international accommodation.”

Had Zbigniew Brzezinski used his powerful influence on American policymakers to be more accommodating to the Soviet Union over Afghanistan instead of using it as the bait to lure them to their destruction during the 1970s, the world and the United States today would, no doubt be in a very different and a much better place.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserve

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat –

OpEdNews 6/28/2018  Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Justice, one of the four theological virtues by Vitruvio Alberi, 1589-1590.   Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic

“On the morning of February 14, 1979, four Afghan terrorists stopped the Ambassador’s car and abducted him as he was travelling from his residence to the Embassy. By 8:50 a.m., the terrorist had taken Dubs to a second floor room in the Kabul Hotel… Despite U.S. Embassy urgings to engage in “patient negotiations,” Afghan police stormed the room just after noon, and shots were fired. When U.S. Embassy officers were able to enter the room, they found the Ambassador dead from several gunshots.”              The Kidnapping and death of Adolph Dubs: Official Summary

After nearly 40 years the February 14, 1979 kidnapping and assassination of U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs remains an enigma. At the time, Cyrus Vance’s State Department and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s National Security Council were deeply divided over policy toward the Soviet Union, Iran and Afghanistan. U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs and Brzezinski held diametrically opposed objectives to the Marxist government of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin which, given the increasingly unstable political climate promoted by Brzezinski, undercut the ambassador and put him in great jeopardy. The Brzezinski/Vance divide came to a head at the Kabul Hotel that February 14; yet basic questions about the political maneuvering inside Washington that had caused the crisis for Dubs and who might have benefitted from his death have never been answered.  Why did Adolph Dubs die at the Kabul Hotel, who killed him and most glaring of all, who benefitted; or as the age old term the Roman’s used for assigning guilt would ask, Cui Bono?

Early reports that the four kidnappers (at least one dressed in a police uniform) were members of a Chinese-trained Tajik-Maoist splinter group of the ruling Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) known as the Setam-i Melli have never been confirmed but are strongly suspected. Neither are the names of the kidnappers known, nor whether it was they or the police who killed the ambassador as they stormed the room in violation (of what the US claimed) was an agreement to patiently negotiate the Ambassador’s release.

No one would ever take credit for the kidnapping, the bitterly divided Afghan regime would not allow the Americans access to the evidence, the crime scene was quickly sanitized and Zbigniew Brzezinski would immediately seize upon Hafizullah Amin’s refusal to accept responsibility and lack of a formal apology as proof of his pro-Soviet, anti-American bent. The kidnapping and assassination of Adolph Dubs would provide the spark to swing opinion in Washington toward Brzezinski’s desire for a more aggressive destabilization of Amin’s government that in turn would lead to exactly what Ambassador Adolph Dubs had died trying to prevent; a Soviet military occupation.

Two Separate events, each with different motives

The debate in Washington was over responsibility for the Ambassador’s death. It focused mainly on whether it was Afghans or Soviet advisors who had ordered the assault and not on the motives of the kidnappers or the actions of the embassy and the American ambassador himself. But if Brzezinski had been correct about it affirming Amin’s pro-Soviet credentials, why had the terrorists chosen an American to voice their protest and not a Soviet? Was Dubs’ plan to draw Amin closer to the U.S. working? Did the kidnappers want to damage Afghanistan’s relationship to the U.S. as Hafizullah Amin later claimed? Or was there another reason for leveraging the life of the American ambassador that neither the Afghans, the Soviets nor the Americans at the embassy were aware of.

As described in an interview conducted for Washingtonian Magazine in 2017 with Bruce Flatin, the political counselor dispatched by the U.S. embassy to the hotel that morning, the whole affair just didn’t add up. “Why not go to some house way out in the suburbs?, he wondered. Or a safe house in the country, or a cave up in the mountains, where authorities couldn’t so easily corner them? Why would Dubs’ captors, whoever they were, hole up at a busy, central hotel, in a room with street-facing windows, no escape route, and not even a phone for conducting negotiations?” And most of all, “Why was Dubs the pawn in what was an Afghan problem? It didn’t make sense.”

And the death of the ambassador that followed made even less sense to an Afghan government struggling to find itself; unless the kidnapping of Adolph Dubs didn’t start out as a kidnapping and his unfortunate death wasn’t the result of a botched rescue attempt, but was a deliberate assassination intended to trap Hafizullah Amin in the role of a Soviet puppet while at the same time removing Dubs as the last remaining obstacle to an ongoing plan.

A False assumption: The “kidnapping” of Adolph Dubs

At a 1995 Nobel Symposium (pages 80-81) on the causes of the Afghan war – in the presence of former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former Director of Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, General William Odom and dozens of former high-level U.S., Soviet and European officials – the leading Russian authority on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the military historian General Alexander Lyakhovsky delivered testimony on the Dubs’ killing which resolved part of the mystery and turned the existing narrative on its head.

“Then there was the episode where the American ambassador was killed. What were the circumstances? My account is based on my conversations with our secret services who were in charge of monitoring the crisis. One of the officers of the secret service told me that Dubs was seen in the company of those same people who kidnapped him later in the same hotel—in the same room—the day before they kidnapped him. And then later Dubs was in his car, with a travel case. He stopped his car when those same people who he saw the day before ordered him to stop, as if they were known to him. You understand that we are talking about an ambassador with an armored car, bullet—proof windows, doors that can be opened only from the inside, it has a siren that goes off in an emergency situation. Dubs did not use any of these emergency measures. He opened the door himself, let the people who kidnapped him in the car. They came to the hotel and demanded that their extremist friends, who were in prison be released. And then Amin ordered the hotel to be stormed. Both the Americans and us pleaded with Amin not to storm the hotel.”

Even today, twenty seven years after the demise of the Soviet Union, most of the reports on the Dubs’ assassination rely on blind speculation or resurrected anti-Soviet Cold War assumptions. But Lyakhovsky’s account provides for new possibilities to explain oddities about the kidnapping that up to now couldn’t be considered.

Under pressure from Brzezinski and the NSC’s Thomas P. Thornton, Ambassador Dubs had been driven to meeting outside the normal channels. Dubs was known by the embassy to have allowed the police to stop and search his car despite his diplomatic immunity – presumably as a safety check before meeting secretly with Amin. Selig Harrison spoke to Bruce Flatin about it in 1989, “[T]he ambassador had talked with Amin fourteen times, often in unannounced meetings, before Dubs was killed in February 1979. No record of the content of these exchanges has yet surfaced.” And they never would. According to interviews conducted by Henry S. Bradsher for his 1985 book, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union,  U.S. officials back in Washington denied published reports that “Dubs had frequent lengthy discussions with Amin,” while insisting that his reports “did not indicate he felt that he was making any progress toward convincing Afghan officials that they should resist Soviet influence.” But as Selig Harrison makes clear in his 1995 book with Diego Cordovez, Out of Afghanistan, Dubs was careful NOT to inform Washington of his progress with Amin out of fear that in the prevailing climate which Brzezinski ruled, it would have cost him his credibility.

According to Lyakhovsky’s account Dubs had gone to the Kabul Hotel on the 13^th of February to meet with four men most likely aligned with the U.S. but opposed to the Taraki/Amin regime. Judging by their demands on the 14^th, these men would have been supported by agencies friendly to the American mission, presumably in Pakistan, Iran or China. Soviet intelligence reports from the era indicate that in January 1979, Beijing had made an attempt to unite the “scattered groups of Afghan Maoists,” including “Setam i Melli and other splinter groups,” whose “program task” was the overthrow of the Afghan government. Recall that prior to his overthrow in April 1978, Prince Mohammed Daoud had ordered the Americans to stop meeting with the Afghan left but the Americans had not complied. Now, in one possible scenario, Dubs could have informed these pro-Maoist leftists that he did not want Amin overthrown and was ending their support by the embassy. An agreement was reached and a final payment of some sort agreed to. The next day – suitcase in hand – he was stopped at a prearranged spot by the same four men he’d met with the day before but for some unknown reason the conditions had now changed. Whatever the deal that had been struck now involved the release of Tajik/Shiite Maoists imprisoned by the regime. The Kabul Hotel was the worst possible location for such a transaction and the room 117 was indefensible. The decision to return to that room made absolutely no sense unless one of the four “kidnappers” was leading Dubs and the other three into a trap to which the busy Kabul Hotel was a key.

Dubs had put himself in the middle of a factional fight between anti-Pashtun Tajik/Shiite Maoists and pro-government Pashtun nationalist unaware that they were all being manipulated by an international criminal conspiracy working on behalf of Brzezinski’s agenda to use Hafizullah Amin and three of the “kidnappers” as patsies to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam.

Why assault the room?

Based on published accounts it’s fairly certain that four men arrived at the hotel with Dubs but agreement on every other aspect of the so called “kidnapping” and death ends there. According to the Afghan report of the events three were killed in the room with Dubs, a fourth kidnapper was wounded and a short time later died of his wounds. The Americans claimed that two kidnappers were killed in the room, a third was taken alive downstairs early on and was later seen being taken from the hotel “alive and relatively unharmed.”

A third account by Soviet KGB defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin maintains that of the four terrorists “Two died in the attack, one was taken into custody, and one escaped – it isn’t clear how,” suggesting that the fourth kidnapper had been helped.

Echoing Brzezinski’s longstanding practice of automatically claiming Soviet culpability before the facts were even known, the American report – leaked to the Washington Post by anonymous sources – openly claims a Soviet responsibility for Dubs’ death. Newsweek’s Ron Moreau cited unnamed “U.S. congressional sources” stating that “the Russians had wanted Dubs to die.” But Mitrokhin goes out of his way to insist that whatever influence KGB advisors might have had on the Afghan police that day, there was no “preconceived Soviet plot to kill Dubs.”

The Afghans produced four dead bodies for the Americans that evening and claimed they were the kidnappers. Bruce Flatin recognized the two that had died with Dubs and a third who’d been taken alive from the hotel, but the fourth was a man he had never seen before. “In Kabul,” Flatin told his Washingtonian interviewer, “it was easy to get a fourth body—right out of the jail. So there he was, the fill-in.” The autopsy revealed that Dubs had been killed by 4 shots to the head delivered at close range from a .22 caliber weapon. Not the kind of weapon, according to Flatin, used by Afghan soldiers or police, but the favorite type of weapon used by professional assassins.

No one has ever suggested the existence of a separate non-governmental agency in the death of Adolph Dubs, nor even hinted at it. The existence of the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged to have existed by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal at a Georgetown University event in 2002.  But the Safari Club’s no-compromise, anti-Communist agenda had been brought directly into the White House with Brzezinski’s National Security Council in 1977 and it had been active in Afghanistan long before February 14, 1979. If ever there was an opportunity for their 1,500-strong “black network” of CIA misfits, malcontents, assassins and enforcers to act on Brzezinski’s agenda to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam, it was at room 117 of the Kabul Hotel on February 14.

Hafizullah Amin later took full responsibility for Dubs’ death and absolved the Soviets, saying they had nothing at all to do with the decision-making. The case was supposed to be closed but it was clear that in addition to Dubs, the other target that day was Hafizullah Amin and thanks to Zbigniew Brzezinski for the next ten months he’d be left to twist in the wind as bait for a Soviet invasion.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat –